Hacker News: sdwr

New comment by sdwr in "GPT-6 Astra"

sdwr — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:53:48 +0000

It's really bad at game design

New comment by sdwr in "No, You Are Not Living in a Computer Simulation"

sdwr — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:55:58 +0000

I think it's a lot more interesting to look for practical markers of simulation than do a teleological thought experiment.

How would a simulated universe differ from a "real" one? How would the simulation cut corners to save resources? Maybe the laws of physics are designed not just to produce interesting results, but also to be efficient to run.

Karl Friston and Steven Wolfram are sniffing around here, with cellular automata and free energy describing ways of partitioning space so it's cheaper to update

New comment by sdwr in ""Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying.""

sdwr — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:57:35 +0000

Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion.

A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project

New comment by sdwr in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

sdwr — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:00:45 +0000

It's an indicator of AI progress. The solutions aren't especially revolutionary, but no person had been able to solve them after decades of collective attempts.

New comment by sdwr in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

sdwr — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:51:59 +0000

No taxation without representation?

New comment by sdwr in "Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children"

sdwr — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:26:25 +0000

Small social sites are just as dangerous in another way, as vessels for a toxic monoculture. Pro-anorexia forums, political radicalization, there was even a famous one that fetishized infecting people with HIV.

New comment by sdwr in "Staying Awake (2008)"

sdwr — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 21:55:59 +0000

Does reading books have intrinsic value, or is it just a specific (archaic?) way of transmitting information? Socrates would be a podcaster today

New comment by sdwr in "Sagrada Família Lego set"

sdwr — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:48:38 +0000

The only people I've ever met who get excited filling out forms were German

New comment by sdwr in "Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Cronin (2014)"

sdwr — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:10:30 +0000

Art is communication. If you can convey the message to an intern on a post-it, what's the point!

My favorite art is the kind that describes to people how they already feel.

New comment by sdwr in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

sdwr — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:08:52 +0000

That's amazing! The "machines as woodland fairies" conceit imagines them as natural creatures, but nature has no laws

"In developing countries, everything is possible and nothing works. In developed countries, everything works and nothing is possible."

New comment by sdwr in "Building Pi with Pi"

sdwr — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:24:04 +0000

Yeah it's hot...

New comment by sdwr in "SpaceX S-1"

sdwr — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:25:32 +0000

They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.

New comment by sdwr in "The Third Hard Problem"

sdwr — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:49:49 +0000

The map is not the territory!

New comment by sdwr in "Parents say ChatGPT got their son killed with bad advice on party drugs"

sdwr — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:46:30 +0000

There's soft guardrails for "reputable" content. A publishing house has to buy it, stores have to agree to distribute it, and if people are upset they can raise a stink and get the book pulled.

Technically, people can write whatever they want, but practically you can't walk into a bookstore and read whatever you want.

New comment by sdwr in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

sdwr — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:28:17 +0000

Same as it ever was

New comment by sdwr in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

sdwr — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:51:25 +0000

And the EU wants to insulate itself from Russia with friendly, ideologically-compatible countries. Can't put a price tag on safety

New comment by sdwr in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

sdwr — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:15:55 +0000

Emergency medicine is the coding of medicine. Fast feedback loop, requires broad rather than deep judgement, concrete next steps.

The AI coding improvement should be partially transferrable to other disciplines without recreating the training environment that made it possible in the first place. The model itself has learned what correct solutions "feel like", and the training process and meta-knowledge must have improved a huge amount.

New comment by sdwr in "Withnail's Coat and I"

sdwr — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:16:58 +0000

Yeah, fractal means you see the same structure, or an equally complex structure, at the smaller scale. This is just details, there's no sustained complexity

New comment by sdwr in "Interview with Bob Odenkirk"

sdwr — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:41:24 +0000

So poor people and historical people are in the same bucket as dogs, got it.

How lucky we are to be the only generation in history capable of thinking and reflecting!

New comment by sdwr in "The Free Universal Construction Kit"

sdwr — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:41:49 +0000

Economy of scale, Lego can invest the billions(?) in machines and molds that don't leave connection points (?), partially by reusing pieces between sets.